Par Coralie Durand
Published on
“If this continues, I don’t know how we’ll get out of this.” He said Julien Couvreur. The director of Saint-Nazaire hospital (Loire-Atlantique) clearly draws the Wake Up. The saturation of emergenciesmore and more frequent, it turns the city of health upside down high voltage. That week civil protection he had to come and help the service personnel. “It’s the first time we’ve been forced to do this.”
“Even during Covid, this hadn’t happened to us”
Currently, the daily number of urgent visits exceeds 190. For several weeks, appeals to the population have been increasing to moderate this figure and avoid (long) waiting times. The reason : the triple epidemic of the moment (bronchiolitis, flu, Covid), with early flu in particular and which “requires more hospitalizations”.
But the situation does not improve. For the first time we had to appeal to civil protection to help people waiting for basic needs: meals, going to the bathroom. Even during Covid, this hadn’t happened to us.
Elective surgeries continue to be so deprogrammedand this will continue “definitely until mid-January”.
Trial teams
There is a lot of talk about the closure of hospital beds as a cause of crisis in the hospital. In Saint Nazaire, all our beds remained open“says the director. Lack of staff? “We are lucky to always recruit, our number of caregivers does not decrease”. But this is not enough.
This is the double penalty for the teams, which are put to the test. The number of passages increases, but in addition we have no outlets for patients after emergencies, neither in follow-up nor for a return home.
Julien Couvreur doesn’t hide it, he’s not very optimistic about the situation. ” We still have difficult weeks ahead of us, because the epidemic peak has not yet passed. For this you have to understand that you don’t go to the emergency room like you go to the supermarket”.
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